Creativity, Innovation and Urban Transformation (CRIT) | Barcelona | Spain
The research group on Creativity, Innovation and Urban Transformation (CRIT) at the University of Barcelona was formed in 2009 and brings together scholars from sociology, economy and the fine arts. The coordinator of the research Group, Marc Pradel, discussed how the institute operates.
How is the research group organized within the faculty?
Our research group is mainly driven by sociologists, economists and fine arts scholars. It was created in 2009 out of different research projects that converted into this one single group. Becoming a research group brings in funding that makes us able to do different kinds of research. Every discipline brings in a complementary perspective. The sociologists do research on urban governance, multi-level governance, citizenship, etc.; the economists focus on housing and economic development; and the geographers analyze territories in the classical term. We don’t have a specialist in urban sociology but we have masters on urban design that we aim to transform into masters in urban studies in the future.
How is Barcelona, as a capital of urban networking, affecting the organization of your research?
Barcelona has been the world capital for networking and also is, and continuous to be, an urban laboratory for new things emerging. This stimulates research interests and makes it easier for us to keep doing research in Barcelona. There’s innovation and new things happening and it makes actors a lot more interested in the urban.
How do you work with established disciplines in this interdisciplinarity?
It is difficult but has also been a very interesting development. In urban studies people tend to think about interdisciplinarity mainly with geographers and not so much with, for example, economists. This is because of territorial differences. It’s very interesting to see how the social and economic dimension interact and to analyze how social factors influence economic development, and vice versa. We somehow tend to lack the territorial perspective and this is where we seek the collaboration with several different research groups, which have more detailed data. We are not solely producing quantitative data by ourselves, but instead we integrate the data from our colleagues. Focusing on interdisciplinarity paves a way towards a more holistic approach, where we take into account the role of social development, instead of the previous economical perspective about innovation.